Polly Barton

How do we talk about porn? Why is it that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us? In Porn: An Oral History, her extraordinary second book, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences...

Why Japan? In Fifty Sounds, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Polly Barton attempts to exhaust her obsession with the country she moved to at the age of 21, before eventually becoming a literary translator. From min-min, the sound of air screaming, to jin-jin, the sound of being touched for the very first time, from hi'sori, the sound...

What does it mean to lose yourself—and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella...